transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hello, we are transmitting to you from our present, which we can only assume is your distant past, the turbulent time that was the early 21st century. Fearing the great cataclysm that will surely befall our civilization, we began this monumental reference of strange and obscure human knowledge. These recordings represent our attempt to compile and preserve wonders and esoterica that would otherwise be lost. Whether you're listening from an advanced civilization or have just reinvented the technology to decrypt our transmissions, this is our legacy to you. This is our time capsule. This is the Omnibus. You have accessed entry167.ma1323. Certificate number 48560. Nolan Bushnell.

Speaker 2:
[01:18] And the only way you can play any of them is on a home video system made by Atari.

Speaker 1:
[01:29] Hi, Keli. Calling in from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:
[01:35] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[01:36] Well, how would you describe yourself? Give me a one sentence bio.

Speaker 2:
[01:41] A one sentence bio. I fix computers for even bigger nerds.

Speaker 1:
[01:55] Yes, yes. And potentially, you fix computers for some high level nerds doing some high level weird stuff, am I right?

Speaker 2:
[02:07] Yes, that's a good way to put it.

Speaker 1:
[02:09] Okay, thank you. When I said that, for those who aren't watching it on YouTube, he gave a very big charismatic smile. So that'll give you some sense. He's not going to violate his security clearance, but. All right, so Keli, walk us through Nolan Bushnell.

Speaker 2:
[02:29] So partial confession, Nolan Bushnell has been mentioned on Omnibus before. In a John episode.

Speaker 1:
[02:37] Okay, it did sound familiar.

Speaker 2:
[02:39] So I guess this episode could kind of be considered a prequel or a sidequel to another Omnibus episode, the great video game crash of 1983. Yeah, so today we're going to talk about Nolan Bushnell, who was born February 5th in 1943 in Clearfield, Utah. And he was raised LDS, but identifies as a lapsed Mormon. And I think as the story progresses, we're going to figure out that it lapsed pretty early in life. But before we get into Nolan, actually kind of want to take a side trip going back to 1962. Nolan Bushnell is known as the father of video games, but we're going to kind of get into a couple other folks that may actually be the father of video games. 1962, we're at where all great technology stories start. We're at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in the 1960s, and we're in the Model Railroad Club.

Speaker 1:
[03:40] My people.

Speaker 2:
[03:41] Yes, exactly. And what's funny about the MIT Model Railroad Club is it did start in the 40s as actual Model Railroad Club. By the time the 60s had hit, it was sort of this like code for just like all the, like the techie guys that were nerdy even for MIT.

Speaker 1:
[04:02] Yeah, the Model Railroad Club at MIT has also appeared in the Omnibus at some point.

Speaker 2:
[04:07] I would be surprised if it hadn't. I mean, so many things, almost anything tech, any kind of tech you can think of, especially when it comes to computer tech, probably is rooted in the Model Railroad Club. And that's because by 1962, the Model Railroad Club had just basically expanded to people who like to tinker with electronics. And then of course, MIT being a university at the time, a technology university, was starting to get some of the first computers. And so these are some of the first human beings outside of IBM that actually even got to touch a computer. So obviously, they're at the very, very beginning of this thing. And at the time, MIT had an IBM 704, which is a giant room-sized computer. It's one of those ones you feed punch cards into it, and it gives you punch cards back. And if you're a huge math nerd, this is very exciting stuff. But then, a company called Digital Equipment Corporation, these tech companies had really boring names back then, DEC, comes up with what they call the PDP-1, which stands for the Programmed Data Processor-1, another exciting name.

Speaker 1:
[05:24] Yeah, they're really poets, aren't they?

Speaker 2:
[05:26] They really are. Actually, I think it's gonna be a running theme, is that maybe we shouldn't let the tech nerds name things. So, it's a mini-computer. And by mini-computer, meaning the processing stack is about the size of a residential refrigerator. Yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:46] That's really small for the time.

Speaker 2:
[05:48] It is very, very small. And it was very powerful. And it had a switchboard of lights and switches you could interact with it. It actually is really funny. It had a literal typewriter that also was the terminal. So you could type on the typewriter and it used tape instead of punch cards. And it had, and then here's the, this is the big breakthrough. It had a CRT monitor attached to it.

Speaker 1:
[06:13] Was it the first to have this?

Speaker 2:
[06:15] Oh, this was the first computer that was not just spitting back either dip switches and lights or punch cards. It was actually had a CRT monitor on it. But it wasn't as powerful as the IBM 704. And so DEC gives it to MIT and they're like, we can't sell this thing. Maybe your students can figure out something to do with it.

Speaker 1:
[06:39] Because at the time computers were just being used to calculate insurance premiums and rocket trajectories, right? There wasn't a, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:47] And the census. I think the census was one of the first real world applications of the computer, you know, because the government was the only entity on the earth that could afford those, these things at the time. So they give one to MIT and a guy named Steve Slug Russell, because everybody in the Model Railroad Club had to have a, had to have a cool nickname.

Speaker 1:
[07:11] Right. Like a fighter pilot.

Speaker 2:
[07:12] Yeah, exactly. Even though those guys are the opposite of fighter pilots. So anyways, Steve Slug Russell, he has this idea. He's been reading a lot of, he loves comic books. He's been reading a lot of science fiction novels about space cops lately. And he's like, he's like, we could make a game on this thing. And people have been toying with the idea of games on computers for a long time. I mean, Alan Turing had an idea. He wrote a computer game. Alan Turing being the one that broke the ENIAC machine in World War II. But no computer existed in his time. They could run his program.

Speaker 1:
[07:57] He wrote it, but it was, it was like Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter.

Speaker 2:
[08:03] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:03] It couldn't be built.

Speaker 2:
[08:05] It couldn't be built. I think they ran it later after he died. And it worked when they finally invented a computer that could run it. But anyways, so, but Steve finally has access to the computing power. So he wants to, he makes, he makes a game called space war. One word with an exclamation point.

Speaker 1:
[08:23] This is the first game space war, space war.

Speaker 2:
[08:26] Yeah, exactly. And it's awesome, right? It's a great name. So you make space war and it space war is it's two rocket ships and it's like a dog fight. So you play against your friend and you zoom around and you try to shoot the other spaceship and and of course, being an MIT nerd, the rocket ships obey like real physics.

Speaker 1:
[08:48] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[08:48] Like, you know, modern video games kind of just you, you push the button and the vehicles usually steer and just go and stop. But his was like you fired the thruster and the rocket ship started going and it would keep going until you fired again to change its direction.

Speaker 1:
[09:03] So this was like asteroids. That was the very frustrating thing about asteroids. Your ship had momentum and there was no friction in space, so it just kept going.

Speaker 2:
[09:15] Yeah. Space war would have a lot of influence on future games coming up. But yeah, so it was two ships dog fighting. There was a planet in the middle. One of Steve's friends added in gravity and then another friend added in stars in the background. Of course, they were a real set of stars that you can see from a certain, from MIT or something. He really did, he imported a real star map. Yeah. Everybody loved this game. I've actually had the privilege at the Albuquerque History Museum. We had an exhibit come through a few years ago and they had a DEC PDP-1 running space war. So I've seen it in person and it is impressive. It looks like a modern, I mean like modern, like a 1973-ish game. Graphics are way better than you would think they'd be for being the very first video game. But that's also because it was on a pretty darn powerful computer. I mean, these things are a million dollars.

Speaker 1:
[10:16] I mean, it's curious to me that some things are invented right out of the gate. We've talked about it before many times, but like the Fender Telecaster was basically the first electric guitar, the first commercial sort of standard electric guitar. And it's still used everywhere you go. It's still kind of, if you really want to think about it, it's still all you need as a guitar. And I'm surprised that the first video game wasn't modeled on some other sort of board game or strategy game or, you know, like you would think the person making the first game on a computer would make a game like, you know, like Oregon Trail or something like, like, like word text based, you know, kind of adventure rather than just go right to space war.

Speaker 2:
[11:22] Yeah, you know, yeah, that is true. Yeah, he. Steve just jumped right in.

Speaker 1:
[11:29] He saw the future.

Speaker 2:
[11:30] Yeah, he did. He saw the future. You know, it's probably why he's an MIT student. MIT students tended to be good at seeing the future. Yeah, so and also, incidentally, the other big contribution of the Model Railroad Club is they, that was where we first saw the use of the word hack or hacker.

Speaker 1:
[11:48] Oh, no kidding.

Speaker 2:
[11:49] Yeah. And a hack was just any kind of technological advancement. So initially it was like a hack was like, you've figured out a better way to like, you know, organize the train tracks or, you know, make the train switching system work. And so then space war was was Steve's big hack.

Speaker 1:
[12:08] And did hack already have the meaning of someone who was kind of just not very great at their job or did that come after too?

Speaker 2:
[12:21] I don't know. I think it came. I don't really know where the roots of hack came. I think it was more like you were just like hacking at a problem until you like chipped away at it.

Speaker 1:
[12:30] Oh, I see.

Speaker 2:
[12:32] Yeah, I think that's really more what they were thinking.

Speaker 1:
[12:36] Right. I get it.

Speaker 2:
[12:38] Yeah, because in the tech world, that's considered like a good way to go about a problem.

Speaker 1:
[12:42] Well, and that would be also that would apply to somebody that was kind of crap at their job, also hacking.

Speaker 2:
[12:50] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you don't work in technology, you're just kind of hacking away at your job. Everyone probably, you're probably the dumb Kevin of the office.

Speaker 1:
[12:58] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[12:59] But yeah, if you're in the tech world, you're probably doing what you're supposed to be doing. But yeah, so yeah, and and so this, you know, and and the game was immensely popular, you know, because obviously the other MIT students started playing it. And then other universities started getting their own DEC machines. And then, of course, you know, reels of the tape of this program made it to these other universities. So other, you know, it got a lot of for for being on a thing that I think there was only 50 of these mini computers ever manufactured. But hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people got to play this game because they were most of them were at universities.

Speaker 1:
[13:42] Yeah, right. And what was the programming language?

Speaker 2:
[13:46] Oh, I don't know. I think at the time it was just literally in machine language.

Speaker 1:
[13:51] Yeah, machine.

Speaker 2:
[13:53] Yeah, because that's that's kind of how it's worked, right? Is like the first computers, it was literally just moving dip switches between ones and zeros. And then they kind of built on that. You kind of came up with assembly, which is like the most basic computer language. It's probably what space war is in. And every single language that come after that has been built on the language prior to it.

Speaker 1:
[14:14] Which is why the world of computers work so flawlessly and never gets forked and does exactly what we want.

Speaker 2:
[14:24] Actually, in my cubicle, I have this picture I got off of Reddit. And it's a bunch of blocks. And at the bottom is like some big blocks. And then they get smaller and more awkwardly placed as it goes up the tower. And it has arrows pointing to it. This is like Linux at the base.

Speaker 1:
[14:46] And is that XKCD? I feel like I've seen that before.

Speaker 2:
[14:51] It is. My favorite though, and there's a little teeny block that says CrowdStrike.

Speaker 1:
[14:59] Right in the middle.

Speaker 2:
[15:01] In the middle of the whole thing. And then also there's a big wedge. In my version, there's a big wedge going into it with a crank that's making the wedge bigger. And it says AI.

Speaker 1:
[15:10] Oh, boy.

Speaker 2:
[15:11] Yeah. Which is.

Speaker 1:
[15:12] Oh, boy.

Speaker 2:
[15:13] Yeah. Don't get me started on that. Oh, and the other thing that ended up happening was DEC ended up including Spacewar on every PDP they sold. Because what it was was, you know, this huge computer, you had to have a tech send a tech out. They had to hook it all up. And so what they do is they play Spacewar to make sure the whole computer had been set up correctly.

Speaker 1:
[15:37] Because Spacewar required every aspect of the computer.

Speaker 2:
[15:41] Yes. Every single bit of this computer had to be working to get Spacewar fired up. So it was a good-

Speaker 1:
[15:48] Did DEC pay any kind of royalty or hire the inventor, or was this just back in the old days when everybody was friends and nobody thought of this as work for hire?

Speaker 2:
[16:06] Yeah, no, it never paid a dime for it. Because actually, there was this idea, because we had the Model Railroad Club, and then there was this other thing happening in California called the Homebrew Computer Club. And there was very much this idea that if you made computer hardware, it was okay to sell that for money, because you had to buy silicone and plastic and have people in the assembly line. So it was still a thing. It was like a lawnmower. It was okay to sell that. But software was ideas, and computers were supposed to be this thing where we could, if you were just a smart person, you could sit down at it and you could have an idea and you could build on it and you could take someone else's idea and you could modify it and add on to it just like how Steve built the game, but then his friend added the stars and his other friend added the gravity well, you know, and all of that was in the spirit of things. That's what you're supposed to be doing. And the Homebrew Computer Club was the same way. So there was very much this idea that software was supposed to be free. And then long story short, Bill Gates ruined that idea. Yeah, boy, because he was in the Homebrew Computer Club and he just stole everything.

Speaker 1:
[17:20] Yeah, right.

Speaker 2:
[17:20] A different entry.

Speaker 1:
[17:22] The idea of licensing became a thing.

Speaker 2:
[17:26] Yeah, that's that's really what he invented. So yeah, so this kind of brings us back to Nolan Bushnell. So Nolan Bushnell goes to 1964, he goes to Utah State University, he ends up transferring to the University of Utah College of Engineering. And in the process of that, he gets to play space war because he's a college student, he has access to it. And so he sees space war and this already like plants a seed in his brain that stays there while he finishes school. And the other half of the other seed that gets planted in Nolan Bushnell's brain during his college years is, Nolan Bushnell is kind of really good at like handing himself lemons and then making lemonade. So one of the first things he does is he loses all his tuition money gambling.

Speaker 1:
[18:27] Oh, yeah, right on.

Speaker 2:
[18:29] Right?

Speaker 1:
[18:30] So he's left the church behind by this point.

Speaker 2:
[18:33] Yeah, clearly. So he loses his tuition money gambling. So he has to get a job and he gets a job at Lagoon Amusement Park, which is another kind of indication he's lapsed, right? Because, you know, as you know, during this time, amusement parks were kind of considered seedy.

Speaker 1:
[18:55] Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2:
[18:56] You know, pinball is associated with gambling. You know, and this amusement park has all the other things, you know, the knock over the bottles with the baseball, the get the ducks out of the pond or the fishing pole, you know, all those all those games that, like you said, probably the world's hairiest woman and yes, and a two headed calf. Yeah. But but Nolan is working in the midway portion. So he's in the games. He starts off as like he's the caller. He's the guy trying to get you to come over and throw a baseball at the bottles. And he's and he's pretty good at it. You know, he knows that, like, he has to put on a show and then you play the game and you lose and he's like, sorry, kid, next. Or, you know, probably not kids at the time. But anyways, so yeah, he after two seasons, he's made manager of the games department because he's like doing really well at it. And so during this time, even while he's learning engineering, he's learning the business of games. He's learning the importance of having a hook to get people in to play games. And then he's learning about how like, you know, the best games get in so many quarters per hour, things like that. You know, so he's really, really fascinated by this thing at this point. So then he graduates from the University of Utah.

Speaker 1:
[20:18] And the degree in engineering.

Speaker 2:
[20:19] With the degree in engineering, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[20:21] Isn't this interesting? It's so wonderful how so many great careers start as just a side quest, as just the weirdest like other. But it combines somehow with your, you know, I always wanted to be a radio DJ when I was in high school. And it took me 30 years. And now basically I'm a radio DJ.

Speaker 2:
[20:46] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think, I think that's happens to a lot of us. We, we, we actually find what we want to do when we're young, but then we find out it pays peanuts. So we have to go through all this like other adventures. And then we finally get to do it, you know, in our forties and fifties. Yeah. So afterwards, he works for a couple of different engineering firms. He ends up at a place called Ampex.

Speaker 1:
[21:12] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[21:12] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[21:13] Which I know them quite well there. They're making the magnetic tape that's running the computers.

Speaker 2:
[21:18] Yes, they are. And you kind of went into this in another Omnibus episode actually about Nolan's time at Ampex. So yeah, he's working in Ampex. They make electronics, industrial controls, they also make the tapes. They make a lot of early electronic stuff. Nolan tried to get hired at Disney several times. He really, really wanted to work for Disney, but never quite made it because they have pretty high standards. Also it's kind of hard to get hired by Disney if you don't graduate from the University of California system. It's pretty tricky. But while he's at Ampex, he meets his buddy Ted Dabney. Actually, I think Dabney is the one that ends up showing him Space War. And the other thing that happens is Ampex allows the employees to take home a certain percentage of spare parts. These are things like just loose transistors, things like that. They're like a nickel apiece.

Speaker 1:
[22:22] Right.

Speaker 2:
[22:22] They can take home.

Speaker 1:
[22:23] But still, there are companies that are super mad if you take home post-it notes.

Speaker 2:
[22:28] Yes. Yeah. And so this is kind of like another one of those like, one of those things that happens in the Nolan Bushnell story that lets him get started. So anyways, he threw a combination of him fabricating his own cabinet and some spare parts he gets from Ampex and some, and he puts his own money into it too. He decides he's going to make a commercial version of Space War. He's going to, he's, he's come up with the idea of an arcade machine version of Space War. And he gets his other companies to work for. He licensed or hires them out to make this crazy fiberglass cabinet that it goes in, but it looks very much like a modern arcade cabinet. And, and it's kind of a miracle that he pulls us off because Space War took a ton of computing power. But the way he does it is the machine is purpose-built to only do Space War.

Speaker 1:
[23:22] Right.

Speaker 2:
[23:23] You know?

Speaker 1:
[23:23] And, and compute and processing power is, is doubling every, every what at this point? Every year there's.

Speaker 2:
[23:34] Yeah, but at this point, this is before, this is before microcontrollers. He does this all with wires and transistors.

Speaker 1:
[23:41] Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:
[23:42] So literally has a, he has, he has boards of wire maps that make the spaceships and make the physics and everything. It's very, yeah, it's, it's crazy. So it takes the whole cabinet to hold this stuff. But he does it. And, and the funny thing was the space war was super popular with these engineer kids. And what he finds out is the space war does not translate to the average American because included with the space war is an instruction manual that looks like a phone book and it's hanging by a chain from the machine.

Speaker 1:
[24:17] Yeah, so what he needed was one of those liberal arts people that understands computers just enough to explain it to lay people.

Speaker 2:
[24:24] Exactly. Yeah, or should have let his, you know, let his mom play the game or something.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[28:56] The instruction manual helped you know how the thrusters worked, how the gravity worked. There was a hyperspace feature where you could make the ship jump. Yeah. So it, I mean, it made money because the, some of the first machines, because he was setting up a Southern California, he did put them around in a bar that was near Stanford. And the Stanford kids loved it for a while. But even then after a while, they got tired of it. So yeah. But I think he made enough money where he realized that if he did it right the next time, he could make money at this. So now he and Dabney were in 1970. They found a company called Cissegy.

Speaker 1:
[29:41] That's a terrible name for a company, Cissegy.

Speaker 2:
[29:44] Yes, it is. It is absolutely terrible. Yeah. And the way he comes up with it. So a Cissegy is a, it's a term for when celestial bodies are in alignment. Like if like the Earth, Moon and Sun were all in a line, they formed a Cissegy.

Speaker 1:
[30:02] I've lived this long and never heard that term before. And I'm surrounded by astrology weirdos.

Speaker 2:
[30:10] So it sounds like a horrible, it sounds like one of those fake companies, like in like an office space movie or something.

Speaker 1:
[30:16] Right.

Speaker 2:
[30:17] So yeah, the Cissegy is the, well, that's where they produce the clone of space war. Oh, and then this is the other funny thing. They called it computer space.

Speaker 1:
[30:27] Oh, lame space war was so rad.

Speaker 2:
[30:30] It was, it was so much better. So yeah. So he comes out of this thing called computer space. It has a phone book for a manual hanging from a chain. Yeah. And it, but he proves that he can make a computer game. But yeah. So then in, in true Nolan Bushnell style though, he can't use the name Cissegy anymore. So there's conflicting stories floating around. And he said different things in different interviews. One Nolan Bushnell story is that it was a hippie commune that made candles.

Speaker 1:
[31:05] But, but had the business acumen to copyright the name.

Speaker 2:
[31:08] Yeah. Had, yeah. Had had an LLC called Cissegy in California. Or the other story is that it was a lumber company.

Speaker 1:
[31:15] I feel like the candle wants what we should go with. Cause the lumber company, that just makes no sense at all.

Speaker 2:
[31:21] Yeah. I don't see a lumber company wanting to, to name themselves after a celestial alignment.

Speaker 1:
[31:27] No.

Speaker 2:
[31:29] So anyway, so, so then yeah, he's, he's a big fan of the, the Japanese game go.

Speaker 1:
[31:34] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[31:35] And Atari is kind of the term for check in that game or equivalent.

Speaker 1:
[31:41] It's a, it's a Japanese word, Atari.

Speaker 2:
[31:43] Yeah, it is a Japanese word. So yeah. So he changes the name to Atari. You know, it comes up with the Fuji logo, which is actually like, I think stood the test time of one of the coolest logos companies ever had.

Speaker 1:
[31:57] So this feels like a moment where Mark Miles should put in some kind of sound effect, because you have just introduced the Atari company.

Speaker 2:
[32:07] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[32:08] Which you're wearing an Atari t-shirt even now.

Speaker 2:
[32:12] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[32:12] I was, well, you know, I was trying to be on theme and you know, Atari plays such a huge role in our lives. Someone my age, Atari was the first computer company, a game company, I guess, that any of us had ever, they arrived on the scene and it was like they had invented the world. The 2600 being enough of a deal that I actually co-wrote a song about, the Atari 2600 with Jonathan Colton, that appeared on our Christmas album, One Christmas at a Time. For those of you playing along, for those who want to go download One Christmas at a Time, we have a song called 2600. Oh, that's cool. But so you being a generation younger, Atari would have been also pretty fundamental, but you would have grown up with an Atari that was quite a bit different from mine.

Speaker 2:
[33:14] Yeah. So what's funny is like, I am just the right age to be a Nintendo kid.

Speaker 1:
[33:19] Oh, right. Right. Right.

Speaker 2:
[33:21] I had an NES growing up. But a lot of my friends, it's funny, their older siblings had Atari 5500s, which was the next one. Yeah. So I'm very much on that border. Yeah. So it's like a lot of my friends, older siblings had Ataris and then we had Nintendos. But Nintendo doesn't make a very... I didn't think it made a great Omnibus because it didn't have that like... It's just the story of a... I mean, there is that cool history of it. It was a playing card company. It started in the 1800s, but then the story of the video game, the NES is really just a disciplined Japanese company doing everything right and making a great product.

Speaker 1:
[34:04] I mean, the NES was the point at which, honestly, I got out of video games because it did seem like a thing that young people were playing that had a new culture that I felt like was for kids. Of course, I was still a kid, but I was a snob and I was like, wow, that's for people that like rugrats.

Speaker 2:
[34:34] Yeah, definitely. Also, Nintendo is the comeback after the great video game crash.

Speaker 1:
[34:45] Talked about a great length.

Speaker 2:
[34:47] Yes, now you can pause this, go listen to that episode of Omnibus, now come back. No, actually, this world, we're still all well before that.

Speaker 1:
[34:55] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[34:56] The great crash. But yeah, so he founds Atari. And Atari, one of the other lasting things about Atari is Atari, he rented this little funky semi-industrial office space. You know, it's one of those ones, it's kind of a warehouse in the back and it's sort of like a little office to park a receptionist in the front. And he rents it in Sunnyvale, California. So he's sort of starting to establish the Silicon Valley area.

Speaker 1:
[35:32] He's inventing the Bay Area.

Speaker 2:
[35:35] Exactly, yeah. You know, when he's there, it's Atari and a bunch of plum farms, as he says in an interview. But then eventually, yeah, he kind of, Atari sparks these other tech companies. Yeah, and Atari is like the company that young engineers want to work for. Because at this time, you know, all the other established companies, you have to wear a suit and a tie to come to work.

Speaker 1:
[36:04] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:05] You know, you need to be there from nine to five. You sit in a cubicle and you design, you know, toaster ovens or whatever for the company. And Atari very much, he had this idea, come in, you know, if you're a great engineer, come in when you want, work on your project. If you need to come in at 2 a.m. in the morning, because that's when you're thinking works, you know, do that. I don't care what you wear to work. Also, you know, I don't care what you do at work. And so Atari had this reputation for lots of, you know, a lot of marijuana use at work, a lot of drinking. The board buys a ranch out in Northern California and they have a lot of meetings out there in hot tubs.

Speaker 1:
[37:01] Probably this was the first instance of someone coming to work in a t-shirt that had a wolf howling at the moon.

Speaker 2:
[37:10] Yes, he did. There's actually one really, there's one anecdotal story of some executives visiting Atari and Nolan greets them wearing a t-shirt that says, I like to screw.

Speaker 1:
[37:28] I mean, I think we still have reverberations in our culture from that time when computer programmers and marijuana and anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, like kind of 70s attitudes were really, it was a very similar culture. And I don't know if it's been that for many, many centuries, but it does feel like originally that was where computer innovation came from. And it might have been Steve Balmer that made that, that turned that around and made computer programmers uncool. But I definitely remember thinking that those people in warehouses in San Jose that were making computers were probably also swingers and dope fiends.

Speaker 2:
[38:28] Yeah, I don't know about that. All my source material didn't get too much into Nolan's love life other than he's been married twice, but he didn't seem... There wasn't a lot in the record that suggested he was running around a lot with too many ladies. I think he just really liked to drink, and he really liked marijuana, you know, which was much more controversial at the time than it is now. But yeah, he... So yeah, I like to joke that a computer, you know, musicians were sex, drugs and rock and roll, and the computer programmers were just drugs and rock and roll.

Speaker 1:
[39:13] Yeah, that checks out.

Speaker 2:
[39:14] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so... But yeah, Atari is the place to work at. And then we, you know, and then he starts working on his next big thing. So he starts thinking, okay, I need to do something that's like a lot more simple or easier to manufacture. And this is where we have a little overlap with your old episode. He hires an engineer named Al Alcorn and he tasks Al with making a tennis game. You know, it's just like two lines on each side of the screen is a line down the middle and a ball that goes back and forth. Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Yeah, and you know, this is the game that eventually becomes Pong, which I remember, yeah, you were saying, I remember you said in the old episode, your dad had Pong machines or was the local Pong operator?

Speaker 1:
[40:04] He did. I have no idea. One of the things, when he died, I thought to myself at the time, you know, we had a good enough relationship and had talked so much over the years that there just wasn't anything I wanted to ask him. Nothing was left unsaid, you know, which I think is a lot of people's regret when their parent dies and then they're like, oh, I never apologized or I never found out about my grandmother. But after I had a kid, all of a sudden, I did have all these questions like, wait a minute, why did you do that? Like the decisions you made in 1972, now as a father, I'm having a really hard time understanding what you were doing. But one of the things I do want to know is, where did that pong game thing come from? Like all of a sudden, we had a garage full of tabletop pong games and he had the concession. He had pong games at Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson Army Base. He had pong games in bars all over the city. We also had space war, or I mean, asteroids and the early, like the one, what was the one with biplanes, like some kind of biplane fighter game? We had a whole warehouse full of them. And I don't know if my dad ever made a penny from it.

Speaker 2:
[41:32] Oh, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:33] One day we didn't have them.

Speaker 2:
[41:35] And then one day, yeah, he said they came back and they were all gone one day.

Speaker 1:
[41:39] Right.

Speaker 2:
[41:40] Yeah. Yeah. And that was a pretty common, I mean, because the model at the time was Atari just made these machines and then sold them.

Speaker 1:
[41:51] Oh, they hadn't figured out the licensing thing.

Speaker 2:
[41:54] No. Yeah. Because they built a machine. I think the cost of a Pong machine at the time was $2,000. But if you were in a high traffic area, you know, make that back in quarter, they could, you know, a Pong machine in the right area could make back $20,000 in its lifetime.

Speaker 1:
[42:15] Yeah, right.

Speaker 2:
[42:17] You know, but it had to be the right area. Probably not the middle of Alaska.

Speaker 1:
[42:21] Well, you know, there's not very much to do up there.

Speaker 2:
[42:24] So that is true. Maybe you know, I don't know. Maybe he maybe he did better than you thought. I don't know. But yeah, he, but yeah, so that was Atari's model. They were just, they just sold these things and yeah. And then we kind of get into and then they were sued by Magnavox because Magnavox had created a very similar game that came out right before. And they had it, but theirs was a home system called the Magnavox Odyssey, which you talked about a little bit in that previous episode. But it did want to kind of take a little side trip into. So the inventor of the Odyssey, though, was a very interesting, was a really interesting guy. His name was Ralph H. Bayer. And Ralph was born in Germany. He's in a Jewish family. And like many families at the time, he, they fled Germany just before the Nazis took over. They fled weeks before what they call the night of broken glass. And that was the night that, you know, Germans went to the streets and broke the glass and burned and murdered Jews in the street.

Speaker 1:
[43:37] Crystal.

Speaker 2:
[43:39] Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, thank you. I couldn't remember the German word for it. Ralph and his family fled to America and he got work in his cousin's leather factory where he, Ralph had a, he had a knack for machinery. And so he actually, he took a machine that sewed together briefcases and he rebuilt it so it could sew five briefcases at one time.

Speaker 1:
[44:08] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[44:09] Yeah. And so, yeah, his cousin started making more money. And then he, he started becoming interested in, in radios. He did a correspondence course to learn how radios work. But then he got to be of age and then he was drafted into the US Army as, you know, so many people were. And then he, and then he became not a radio repairman, but he ended up being added to this unit called the Richie Boys, which was an army intelligence unit. And it was mostly made up of German speaking. A lot of them were Jewish, you know, Jewish people that had escaped and then re and then joined. And so they had a knowledge of German culture. They knew the language. And so he went back over to Europe and spent most of his time interrogating captured German soldiers. And then he returned and used his GI Bill and got one of the very first degrees in television engineering.

Speaker 1:
[45:18] Oh, wow. Cool. So sure. Right. He would have been right right there at the at the dawn.

Speaker 2:
[45:24] Yeah. So he knew how televisions work. He had a formal education in it. And he worked on Odyssey as a side project because now he was working for a company called Sanders Associates, which is actually is now BAE, which is a big defense contractor. And they were defense contractor at the time. And so during the day, he was supposed to be building a machine to spy on the Soviets.

Speaker 1:
[45:47] Right.

Speaker 2:
[45:48] But he got permission to spend like 20% of his time working on a game that they could license.

Speaker 1:
[45:57] Oh, so BAE understood what he was doing and thought that his output belonged to them.

Speaker 2:
[46:04] Yeah. And because Ralph is the opposite of Nolan Bushnell, Ralph is a follow the rules. And he's got a great job. He works for an engineering firm that's a defense contractor. He's doing great, but he just has this idea and he just wants to work on it. So he goes to his boss and he's like, can I spend a few hours a week working on this? And this boss is like, yeah. And then if it works, we could license it to somebody. And so he ends up getting it to work and they license it to Magnavox. And Magnavox just sees it as a way to sell TVs.

Speaker 1:
[46:41] Right. Magnavox was a major TV maker and brand.

Speaker 2:
[46:47] Yeah. And that was all they cared about. They didn't understand what they had.

Speaker 1:
[46:51] Right. Of course.

Speaker 2:
[46:54] But Nolan Bushnell comes out with his own version. But the ones he's making are the Pong Arcade Games. But it doesn't stop Magnavox from suing him. There's a pending law or there's a lawsuit. Magnavox wins. But the funny thing is, is like in true Nolan, Nolan Bushnell style, this actually still ends up working in his favor. Because what he does is they settle, he pays Magnavox $1.5 million and then he pays them a really low licensing fee, which allows him to continue to make Pong machines. So what Nolan has is Nolan has a license to make Pong machines and he has this big company going around and suing his competitors.

Speaker 1:
[47:41] Oh, hey, there it is.

Speaker 2:
[47:44] Yeah, because Magnavox continue, you know, and Magnavox ended up pulling in $100 million defending their intellectual property during this time. But it also sort of keeps other people from competing with Atari too much.

Speaker 1:
[48:00] Right. Oh, that's brilliant.

Speaker 2:
[48:03] It is. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:04] Use your opponent's lawyers by having them become your lawyers.

Speaker 2:
[48:09] Exactly. Exactly. All for just one low licensing fee.

Speaker 1:
[48:13] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:13] I think it was like $200,000 or something. Yeah. And so during this time, Pong is just crazy. There's that apocryphal story of Andy Capp's Tavern, where they think the machine is broken, but it's actually overflowed with quarters. And may or may not be true. We don't know. But yeah. But Atari is just making gangbusters with this. And they can't keep up with the manufacturing demand. So during this time, Atari literally, they would just go down to the unemployment office every day. And they would just hire the whole line. You know, not for engineers, but for people to assemble cabinets.

Speaker 1:
[48:57] Right.

Speaker 2:
[48:58] You know, they would just hand them instructions and be like, you know, put this piece here, put this, you know, put in the cabinet, screw it together. I think, I think 20% of the cabinets worked the first time through. But they didn't care. They just, they had to, they had to keep going. So it was really funny. And that really contributed to Atari's like chaotic culture.

Speaker 1:
[49:17] Yeah. I mean, that sounds like Boeing airplanes.

Speaker 2:
[49:20] Yeah. Except it's a little bit lower stakes if your Pong machine doesn't work the first time out of the gate.

Speaker 1:
[49:27] Now have they, they're surely not building every machine with, by, by soldering transistors in. I mean, are they have printed boards by this point? Are they, what's the computer tech like?

Speaker 2:
[49:41] I think there's a little bit, but there still is a lot of wiring, which is why a lot of them have to get redone. I mean, I, I'm not, I didn't, they didn't get into like the deep, deep details on this and my source material, but yeah, there was, there was still like, if you open up a Pong machine, there still is like a mess of wires in there.

Speaker 1:
[50:03] Right. I think I've seen inside. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:05] Yeah. I mean, they were getting there. There still were chips at this point. Actually, there's going to be a story about chips coming up. But yeah, so they had motorcycle gangs and just whatever person had been hanging on the unemployment office putting these things together. And so it sort of had the engineering staff and they sort of stayed in their part of the building and sort of stayed away from the assembly workers. And then apparently, there's just stories about the whole place just reeked of marijuana all day, every day.

Speaker 1:
[50:35] Right. What a work environment. Love it. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:38] It was just a crazy, crazy work environment. And so then that kind of brings us to 1973 and a rival company appears called Key Games, KEE. And they sort of like appear out of nowhere. And they ran by this guy named Joe Keenan. So it's Key Games. And they're making exact copies of Atari games. And there's even there's a heated rivalry in the press. There's even stories of of engineers from Atari getting poached by Key Games. There's stories of Key Games employees breaking into Atari and stealing components.

Speaker 1:
[51:21] Well, what does Magnavox have to say about this?

Speaker 2:
[51:24] Nothing. Long story short, turns out what it is, is Joe Keenan was Nolan Bushnell's neighbor. And one of the things that's kind of weird about the arcade world at this time is, right, you have the people that make the arcade machines and you have the companies that put the arcade, that do what your dad did, that put the arcade machines in bars, in restaurants, right? And then they run around and collect the quarters and they have territories. And they're also operating jukeboxes and probably semi-illegal pinball games and other things like that, but they're doing corner brace up. And if one distributor is carrying jukeboxes made by this company, the other distributor does not want to carry jukeboxes by that same company. They want to carry jukeboxes by a different company. And so Nolan figured this out. So he makes up key games. He asks his neighbor to be the president or the CEO of it. They're making near, there's just another Atari.

Speaker 1:
[52:27] You're kidding that he's made false competition with him.

Speaker 2:
[52:30] He made a false competition. And that's why there's all these stories about it. Because the other funny thing was these distributors love it when the manufacturers hate each other.

Speaker 1:
[52:38] Right, right.

Speaker 2:
[52:39] And so he even goes as far as to fabricate these stories about the break-ins and the poaching of the engineers and the distributors just eat all this up. Until one day when suddenly key games starts beating Atari. So key games comes out with a game called Tank, which there is no Atari equivalent and Tank starts being incredibly popular.

Speaker 1:
[53:01] But this is Nolan putting Tank over in key games.

Speaker 2:
[53:07] This is Joe.

Speaker 1:
[53:09] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[53:10] Joe and his engineers have come up with Tank. And about this time, the distributors are kind of getting wise to it. But also like video games are becoming so lucrative. This kind of old school jukebox game sort of fades. And so now at this point, Key Games gets merged in 1974. So really we only had about a year of this. 1974, Key Games gets merged back in. But one thing we've learned from Key Games is that Joe is actually much better at running a company than Nolan. So Joe becomes president of Atari. Nolan is still CEO, head engineer at this point, sort of just running around causing trouble.

Speaker 1:
[53:52] That's a role that still exists at every tech company in the world.

Speaker 2:
[53:56] Yeah, exactly. He's the troublemaker.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[56:42] So now they've re-emerged and then that kind of brings us to 1974 and employee number 40. So in 1974, they hire their 40th and I don't think this includes the assemblers. This is our 40th engineering employee.

Speaker 1:
[57:01] Right.

Speaker 2:
[57:02] So it's this real scuzzy kid and he just keeps hanging around the receptionist office and he won't go away. And Al Alcorn even says in an interview that he goes to Nolan and he goes, well, there's this kid hanging around and he goes, I think we should either talk to him or we should call the cops.

Speaker 1:
[57:24] Right.

Speaker 2:
[57:25] And so Al decides to talk to him and they end up hiring him. And this kid's name is Steve Jobs.

Speaker 1:
[57:33] Of course.

Speaker 2:
[57:34] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[57:35] This is how I got my first job too. Scuzzy kid that hung around the office.

Speaker 2:
[57:39] Yeah. And it's funny. And the stories are that Steve had really long hair and he smelled really bad. He had really bad hygiene. And this is coming from this like company where like they're all partying and they've got motorcycle gangs working there and they're thinking and they think this kid's gross. So I mean, that kind of gives you an idea of the degree of this. And this is where we get to. So Atari is working on a game called Breakout. Breakout is sort of, it's the one where there's a paddle at the bottom of the screen and a ball that bounces like pong, but you're getting rid of bricks.

Speaker 1:
[58:10] Yeah, at the top of the screen. And the ball starts to move faster and faster and the bricks.

Speaker 2:
[58:14] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[58:15] You know, come closer and closer. Yeah, I played a lot of breakout.

Speaker 2:
[58:18] Oh yeah. Yeah. Because breakout was a huge hit for Atari. So anyways, breakout, they've got breakout built, but the problem is breakout has too many chips because we are using the computer chips, but each chip has a specific job. It's not like nowadays where we have a CPU and he's programed with software and the breakout has something like over, like has something like 200 chips or anything.

Speaker 1:
[58:41] How did they cool these machines? It seems like they would just be baking hot.

Speaker 2:
[58:48] Well, because these chips are way simpler than CPUs, they don't get hot.

Speaker 1:
[58:52] Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:
[58:53] Yeah, these are these are sort of the predecessors to like a modern CPU.

Speaker 1:
[58:56] Got it.

Speaker 2:
[58:58] We're sort of halfway between CPUs and transistors at this point. So they don't get super hot. I think they do have fans in those cabinets when we get to the ones that have chips. But anyway, so what Atari would do is whenever they had a game that had too many chips, they would offer $100 bonus for every chip that you could remove by changing the design or finding a more efficient use of the other chips or whatever. And then there was an additional bonus if you could get any game under 100 chips. So Steve Jobs says like, hey, I'm going to tackle this. And the whole time, Steve has this friend named Steve Wozniak that is not an Atari employee, but he's always hanging around. And Steve Jobs is only working on this at night. So then Steve comes and presents his design. He has gotten it under 100 chips and he gets a pretty substantial bonus. Depending on who you talk to, he got anywhere between $3,000 and $5,000 as a bonus.

Speaker 1:
[60:06] A lot of money then.

Speaker 2:
[60:07] Well, it turns out Steve has never learned how to engineer anything in his life. It turned, or Steve Jobs has never learned anything. It turns out what Steve is doing is Steve Wozniak is the one doing all this design work.

Speaker 1:
[60:21] No kidding.

Speaker 2:
[60:22] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[60:23] Steve Jobs is only like 20 years old at this point.

Speaker 2:
[60:26] Yes. Yeah, he is. He's a young, young kid. I think this is right after he drops out of school. Yeah. So it turns out later that Steve Jobs gave Steve Wozniak, he told him he gave him half the bonus, but he actually gave him $700.

Speaker 1:
[60:45] How, how is all of this written at the very beginning? Like this story, of course, the, you know, the founding of Apple and how Wozniak was kind of the brains behind the, the boss. Like that's all kind of written into the story now, but this is just the, it's just from the very DNA of Steve Jobs' career is that his, just as you said, Bill Gates' real innovation was figuring out how to license software, and Steve's innovation was just getting Steve Wozniak to do the work?

Speaker 2:
[61:23] Yes, yeah, I mean, and that's kind of every tech company, even like modern tech companies. Every tech company is really just a pool of engineers, and these are just folks that went to school because they like to put things together and figure stuff out. And then there's a whole other staff of middle management and project planners just whipping the engineers until they make something.

Speaker 1:
[61:48] Right. Wow. So Steve did know how to program computers or didn't at all?

Speaker 2:
[61:56] Oh, no. Steve Jobs, it turns out he really didn't know much of anything about technology. He just, he knew how to spin a good story, which is probably critical to Apple's success. Steve Jobs was the front man. Obviously, somewhere along the line, he shaved his head and learned how to take a shower and put on the black turtleneck.

Speaker 1:
[62:21] Yeah. Well, but he still had that utilitarian, like, well, I guess I have to shower, but I'm not going to ever choose my clothes. I'm just going to wear the same thing every day.

Speaker 2:
[62:32] Yes, exactly. Yeah. And a lot of other tech CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg does the same thing. He's pretty famous for just wearing a gray t-shirt and jeans. And apparently, he just has 50 of this gray t-shirt.

Speaker 1:
[62:44] And I'm sure they all cost $1,200 and are made out of pure cashmere.

Speaker 2:
[62:49] Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's made by kittens or something. But yeah, Steve Jobs kind of pioneered all of that stuff. And yeah, Steve Wozniak really invented the tech. Yeah, and then it's funny because Steve Jobs eventually left or he... Steve Jobs went on a pilgrimage to India. The Bushnell ended up buying him a plane ticket to get there because Bushnell needed him to stop in Germany and fix some Pong machines or some arcade machines that were malfunctioning in Germany. So he gave him a quick class on how to fix stuff. And then flew him to India via Germany. And then that was kind of the end of Steve Jobs at Atari. Except the one last final kind of gotcha in that is that Bushnell, after Steve Jobs came back from India, Bushnell did introduce Steve Jobs to Sequoia Capital, which is the venture capital firm that funded Apple.

Speaker 1:
[64:01] Right.

Speaker 2:
[64:02] So Steve, and the funny thing was is also Bushnell was offered a chance to buy in to Apple for $50,000, which Bushnell chose not to.

Speaker 1:
[64:12] Oh dear.

Speaker 2:
[64:14] Yeah. And there's a famous quote that he says in an interview. He goes, I was so smart, I said no. It's kind of fun to think about when I'm not crying.

Speaker 1:
[64:23] I mean, just imagine the billions that that represented. But Donald Sutherland turned down a percentage of the receipts for Animal House, and he would have also been a multi-millionaire from that.

Speaker 2:
[64:43] Oh yeah. I mean, there's stories like that all the time. And actually, it's funny because Steve, not Steve Jobs, Bill Gates actually tried to set up Microsoft and Albuquerque.

Speaker 1:
[64:52] Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2:
[64:54] And so actually, there's an old guy I used to go to church with, and he worked in the same building that Bill Gates was renting an office in the basement of. And he would tell the story about how he was going to work, and every morning there was this scuzzy kid in the elevator. And then he says, one day, this scuzzy kid has the nerve to ask me for $200 to buy 100 shares of stock in his company.

Speaker 1:
[65:26] The nerve.

Speaker 2:
[65:27] The nerve. Yeah, and then he's like, and then five years later, this company was all over the news.

Speaker 1:
[65:33] Yeah, right. Well, I could have bought Bitcoin in 2011.

Speaker 2:
[65:37] Yeah, I think everybody has a story like that, but that's my favorite one.

Speaker 1:
[65:41] That's pretty great. That's pretty great. You're only two kisses away, or you're only one kiss away from somebody that could be worth a lot of money. But this is an alternate universe where Microsoft is in New Mexico and you've been working for them for a dozen years.

Speaker 2:
[65:59] Oh yeah, that's true. It is an alternate universe. Yeah, think about it. If that guy had given him the $200, he would have stayed.

Speaker 1:
[66:07] Yeah, right. Oh my God. Yeah. Whoa. $200, it's changed history.

Speaker 2:
[66:14] Yeah. So then anyways, we get to 1975 and Atari's decided they're going to do Home Pong. Because Magnavox Odyssey isn't really blowing up the world because Magnavox isn't handling it right. And so they decide they can get into this game. So they engineer their own version of Home Pong. It looks better than the Magnavox Odyssey. It has some advanced features. Al Alcorn added. You can put English on the ball if you move the paddle, right?

Speaker 1:
[66:44] Right.

Speaker 2:
[66:45] Things like that. There was, yeah, there's a lot of, it was a better version of Pong. So they engineer it up and that part's not very hard. The hard part though is, you know, this is pre-internet and the way you really want to sell a product is you need to get into the Sears catalog.

Speaker 1:
[67:00] For sure.

Speaker 2:
[67:02] The way the Sears catalog works at this time is every department has their own manager. And at first, they're trying to get into the toy section, but the vice president of the toy section of the Sears catalog doesn't really understand what he's looking at. And so they actually end up going with the sporting goods department.

Speaker 1:
[67:23] Really?

Speaker 2:
[67:24] Yeah, because it's table tennis, right?

Speaker 1:
[67:26] Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2:
[67:28] Yeah, they're like, look, you could put it, you could put it right next to the actual table, you know, the actual ping pong table, and right next to it, you could have electronic ping pong.

Speaker 1:
[67:37] That is not where I would have looked for it when perusing the Sears catalog. I'm surprised it wasn't with the televisions and radios.

Speaker 2:
[67:44] Yeah, it exactly right. It you're thinking maybe be with the toys, maybe be with televisions, ends up in the sporting goods section. But also, it's really funny now. This is back in the day too, like when Sears is going to add some of the catalog, like they want to come out to your factory and they want to see it.

Speaker 1:
[68:00] Right.

Speaker 2:
[68:01] And they want to look at a demo of the product and they want to see your manufacturing facility and all this stuff. So there's this really funny story. And of course, Sears is blue suits and tight cut haircuts, you know, you know, the real straight straightforward square company. And they send a group of executives out to Atari and they walk in. It reeks of marijuana. Everybody's wearing t-shirts and jeans and Nolan Bushnell greets them wearing a t-shirt. Oh, actually, even that even even better when they walk in the door, Nolan is is in a box riding on a conveyor belt. Because that was a thing he liked to do.

Speaker 1:
[68:41] Oh, this wasn't for their benefit. This was just something he liked to do.

Speaker 2:
[68:45] This was a thing he would do. And the other employees, they would get into a box and they would they would have races on the conveyor belts. And the Sears employees walk in while the CEO of the company is doing this. And so it's funny, like the Atari guys are like, oh, man, we we really messed up like this. The Sears guys are not going to take it seriously. And and but then they had a dinner that night. And so the Atari guys show up and they put on suits and they do their hair and they show up and like, OK, we got to we got to be grown ups. And and the funny thing is, apparently, the Sears executives went back to their hotel rooms and thought, oh, man, this new, like, trendy company is going to think we're a bunch of squares. So they showed up to the dinner in t shirts and jeans.

Speaker 1:
[69:37] That's very cinematic. That feels like a like a scene from from a movie about this.

Speaker 2:
[69:45] Yeah, exactly. And of course, they all have a good laugh. And and and the Atari home pong game ends up in the Sears catalog just in time for Christmas.

Speaker 1:
[69:56] And people do people find it. Does it sell well in the catalog?

Speaker 2:
[70:00] Yeah, it does well enough. It does well enough that Atari actually escapes the need to get venture capital money. That's kind of a little side quest that that is like way too detailed to get into right now.

Speaker 1:
[70:16] No, but that's a big deal. They don't have to they don't have to split their profits with with bankers.

Speaker 2:
[70:23] Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it kind of saves the company. And then it also, this is what finally catches the attention of Warner Communications. So in 1977, Warner Communications is there. Warner is wanting to own everything media. They want to own television, movies, movie theaters. And so they decided they need to add video games to the portfolio. And so they buy Atari for 28 million. Bushnell receives 15 million of that.

Speaker 1:
[71:01] Whoa.

Speaker 2:
[71:02] Yeah. So Bushnell is okay.

Speaker 1:
[71:08] Well, yeah, at this point. Again, that's 1975 money.

Speaker 2:
[71:13] Yes, or 1977. And but what Warner does is they take this guy named Ray Kasser, and they make him, he's the new, I guess he comes in as a consultant initially, and he's the one that's going to fold them into the Warner Communications family. And Ray Kasser is three-piece tailored suits. He's the former CEO of Burlington Industries. So like, so he's coming from the textile world.

Speaker 1:
[71:44] Right, Burlington Coat Factory, as we say.

Speaker 2:
[71:46] Yeah, exactly. Burlington Coat Factory and other clothing brands. And it's funny, this is like the most like old 1970s guy logic of possible, is they think Ray is the guy, because he's been working with clothing designers for the last, you know, so many years, and he's been really successful. So he can work with game designers, because they're both designers.

Speaker 1:
[72:12] Right, of course.

Speaker 2:
[72:14] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[72:15] Of course, not realizing, yeah, that it's not exactly the same job.

Speaker 2:
[72:21] Yeah, exactly. So he shows up, he wears three-piece tailored suits, he gets driven by a driver, he is straight edged, never used drugs in his life. And so he comes in and of course, like the Bushnell and the other engineers just immediately start screwing with him. Right. They invite him to meetings and he shows up and he's ready for a meeting. And instead they're just in Bushnell's office drinking, drinking and smoking.

Speaker 1:
[72:52] Which is where all the business gets done. That's always been where the business gets done.

Speaker 2:
[72:56] But they would do that knowing that he would leave. He will leave the room if they were smoking. So, needless to say, this is kind of the beginning and the end of Nolan at Atari. So, he eventually, Nolan decides he's going to leave Atari because he's just not fitting in with how Ray Kassar is running the company. He's got 15 million dollars in the bank. He'll probably be okay.

Speaker 1:
[73:22] Did that seem like a good price for Atari at the time? You know, it's always hard to gauge whether you should have sold your, you know, you should have sold Instagram to Microsoft, or whether you should have kept it, which would have been the better business decision. At the time, was it a question of either Atari sells to Warner, or they get surpassed? Or when we look back, does it feel like he sold Atari too early and should have? I know this is kind of an academic business question, but.

Speaker 2:
[74:02] I mean, I think. I think they sold because, I mean, $28 million was, I mean, it's a lot of money today.

Speaker 1:
[74:09] Yeah, it was a ton of money, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[74:10] And it was even more money in 1977. I mean, obviously in hindsight, they sold it exactly the right time because just, you know, right down the road is the great video game crash.

Speaker 1:
[74:22] Right.

Speaker 2:
[74:23] Right. So, you know, once again, Nolan, kind of got out by the skin of his teeth. Yeah, he did, which is fine. I mean, Warner is a big enough company that even though there is this great video game crash, they obviously survive, they're still around today.

Speaker 1:
[74:41] Well, it says here, Ken loves to do this and now I'm doing it too. In 1977, 28 million was $150 million in today's money.

Speaker 2:
[74:53] Okay. I mean, maybe for a tech company, you would probably get more these days, but you know, if you keep in mind, this is the time, we didn't know that tech was the golden.

Speaker 1:
[75:01] Yeah, that's right. They're selling this as a sporting good. So sure.

Speaker 2:
[75:05] Yeah, they thought they were buying a sporting good company or a children's toy.

Speaker 1:
[75:13] So then what does Nolan do? Does he go and live the rest of his life on an island?

Speaker 2:
[75:17] So Nolan finally works on his passion project that has been secretly percolating in the back of his brain since 1970, when he met Ted Dabney. So Nolan, because remember in college, he worked for the Lagoon Amusement Park, and he liked the idea of operating games. He had always had this crazy idea of a pizza restaurant that also had video games.

Speaker 1:
[75:45] Wait a minute. Go on.

Speaker 2:
[75:48] Yeah. But video games weren't where they needed to be. So obviously, he needed to go invent a whole industry first to make his pizza restaurant work. And actually, it's funny, the last few years, he actually spun off this company. Originally he was going to call it Coyote Pizza, and he had bought a costume, like the folks that walk around Disneyland, he can walk up and talk to Mickey Mouse. He had had a costume custom made, it was supposed to be a Coyote. But it had been sitting in his office, his employees said, you know, Nolan, it looks a lot more like a rat. And he's like, oh yeah, you're right. So he renames his pizza chain, Rick Rat's Pizza.

Speaker 1:
[76:37] Rick Rat's Pizza. And as we know, nothing makes you want pizza more than the idea of a rat.

Speaker 2:
[76:44] Exactly, exactly. And that's what his employee, his staff goes, Nolan, you don't want the word rat in the name of a restaurant. And I think, and it's been lost to history, but one of his staff members goes, what if we named the rat Chuck E. Cheese?

Speaker 1:
[77:02] And wow, where did the Chuck E come from?

Speaker 2:
[77:05] That's the problem that's been lost to history.

Speaker 1:
[77:08] Chuck E. Cheese. I get the cheese. It's a mouse likes cheese and it's on pizza.

Speaker 2:
[77:15] Yeah, exactly. And I think that and, you know, and that's just, that's where they, yeah, that's where it came from. Is there just like, well, you know, Chuck E. Cheese, like he's still a rat, because unfortunately we ordered the rat costume by accident.

Speaker 1:
[77:28] Right. Thinking it was a coyote.

Speaker 2:
[77:30] Yeah, exactly. But they say, let's call it, let's call it Chuck E. Cheese. And so he actually calls it like Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Cafe or something like that. That's what actually the first location is called. And yeah, so he had actually opened that a few years before he left Atari. And so what, as he's leaving, he goes to Warner and he buys back Chuck E. Cheese from Warner for $500,000.

Speaker 1:
[77:56] Seems like, seems like he really, cause that seems like an awful lot of money to buy back your, your rat themed pizza parlor. But he's got a vision. He does.

Speaker 2:
[78:09] He has a vision. And, and also it's because Chuck E. Cheese originally was a, was a part of Atari. So he kind of had to buy it back from Warner. So he buys it back from Warner and then he's like, okay, I've got one location, it's working, it's making money. He comes up with the idea of Chuck E. Cheese also because he always wanted to work for Disney. He has this idea that he wants animatronic characters. But unfortunately, he's not that great at animatronics. He gets an animatronic guy, but he doesn't get the best animatronic guy. So they're in picture frames on the wall.

Speaker 1:
[78:45] So they're like- The animatronic characters are?

Speaker 2:
[78:47] Yeah, the animatronic characters, they're like from the torso or chest up, they're like talking heads, and they're in frames on the wall, sort of like a bad Harry Potter movie.

Speaker 1:
[78:59] Yeah, right, like a spooky, why are these pictures alive kind of thing.

Speaker 2:
[79:03] Exactly, and it's actually kind of funny. Initially, Chuck E. Cheese has a Jersey accent, he has a cigar in his hand that he's like smoking, and he's like sort of an insult comic. Yeah, so he sort of razz the audience, he would like, and then he's like, which one of these kids has a birthday today? And, you know, and he's kind of making like slightly off-color jokes. Yeah, and so he has that, and then he has a cast of characters. Then Chuck E. Cheese has a Pascali, which is the worst Italian stereotype, like every Italian stereotype rolled into this animatronic character, and then like turned up to 11.

Speaker 1:
[79:52] What is a Pascali?

Speaker 2:
[79:54] That's just, it sounded Italian.

Speaker 1:
[79:57] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[79:58] Like that's the character's name is Pascali. He's Pascali the chef, and he's just, he's just the worst Italian.

Speaker 1:
[80:04] Azzolazza mozzarella.

Speaker 2:
[80:06] Yeah, exactly. He's like, hey, yeah, yeah. And then we have, and then they have Dolly Dimples, which she is a hippopotamus who sits behind a piano, and every time she hits a high note, her like bosom goes up and down.

Speaker 1:
[80:21] Yeah. Okay. I have big memories.

Speaker 2:
[80:23] Yeah. And then they have Mr. Munch, who is a hairy alien from another planet. Nolan later admitted he was just a straight ripoff of Cookie Monster.

Speaker 1:
[80:34] Oh, yeah. Okay. All right.

Speaker 2:
[80:36] And then this is probably the worst character. They had Jasper T. Jowles, which was a hound dog. But he's supposed to be from the South. So he's like this horrible Southern accent and all the Southern stereotypes. And on both sides of his picture frame are Confederate flags.

Speaker 1:
[80:56] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[80:57] That wave back and forth to the music.

Speaker 1:
[81:00] Wow. Well, that didn't test very well over time, I'm guessing.

Speaker 2:
[81:04] No, that's the part of the story that does not age well at all.

Speaker 1:
[81:10] I mean, part of the appeal of Chuck E. Cheese was that the animatronic band, which had eventually evolved to be a life size or even greater than life size band of animatronic animals, they were terrible. It was a terrible band and the animatronics never got better, right? They were just always like, I mean, Disney had Abe Lincoln back in the 50s that was like plausible.

Speaker 2:
[81:36] Yeah. But you know, that was part of Nolan's problem, right? Disney had all the good animatronic engineers on staff and they weren't about to leave Disney for some pizza startup.

Speaker 1:
[81:49] Right.

Speaker 2:
[81:53] So in 1979, Bushnell wants to expand. So he talks to a guy named Robert Brock, who is, who's from this company called Topeka End Management. And so, you know, Topeka End Management is, you know, they run hotels, restaurants, right? Nolan's like, okay, I need a restaurant guy to get into business with. I'm going to franchise this to Robert Brock. Robert Brock takes one look at the idea. He gets, he sees the operation. But one thing Robert Brock does is he finds this engineer named Aaron Fetcher and Aaron Fetcher has full bodied animatronics that he's gotten working. Okay. Like he has just in his garage.

Speaker 1:
[82:37] He's like a furry and he's trying to make a sex robot.

Speaker 2:
[82:41] I don't know about that, but he has Aaron as a personal project has built a full band.

Speaker 1:
[82:47] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[82:48] Called the Rockafire explosion. Sure. And he's like demoing it and Robert Brock finds him. So Robert Brock just backs out of the deal and just makes his own pizza restaurant.

Speaker 1:
[83:00] Oh, really?

Speaker 2:
[83:00] Yeah. He just completely backs out and just makes one called Showbiz Pizza.

Speaker 1:
[83:05] I remember Showbiz Pizza too.

Speaker 2:
[83:07] Yeah, exactly. And so Showbiz Pizza has a full band. They are full. They're not in picture frames. They have a stage. They're full bodied animatronics. And they're a lot more like kid friendly. The lead singer is is Fat Stronimo and he's like a bear. I think most of them are they're bears. There's a Rolf DeWolf and Billy Bob Broccoli or Billy Bob Broccoli, which is a play on Robert Brock.

Speaker 1:
[83:42] It's now crazy to me to think that at one point in time in my childhood, there were two competing franchise restaurant change that used animatronic bands of anthropomorphic animals. I guess when you're a kid, you accept these things like, oh, yeah, this is a normal, this is like a total business model. Like why aren't there five of these? And now it seems crazy that there was ever even one.

Speaker 2:
[84:10] Yeah, it does. And well, it also turns out it's just because like it's just, it's just two business guys trying to trying to one up each other. Yeah, so, so obviously Nolan sues him. Because Nolan's learned his lesson from when he copied somebody, they sued him. So he's like, well, sue you.

Speaker 1:
[84:29] Right.

Speaker 2:
[84:30] He sues Chuck E. Chins, Chuck E. Cheese wins. So showbiz pizza has to pay out $50 million to Chuck E. Cheese. But Chuck E. Cheese is hit hard by the video game crash in 1983.

Speaker 1:
[84:47] Right.

Speaker 2:
[84:48] Right. I think because showbiz pizza has enough other things going for it, they weather the storm a lot better. So then the funny thing that happens is showbiz pizza ends up buying Chuck E. Cheese. And so at this point, Nolan is done. He's since gone on and founded a bunch of software companies and other littler companies, but he's never tried to take on the world again.

Speaker 1:
[85:22] Are you saying that Nolan is still alive?

Speaker 2:
[85:25] Yeah, Nolan is still alive. I think he's about 80. I think he's 82. You can go on YouTube, but you can find interviews with him. Right now, I think what he does is he has a maker space that he runs with some of his kids. And he's just like a big kid. He still builds projects. I mean, he had $15 million in 1977, which I'm sure is more than $15 million now, so I mean, he's fine.

Speaker 1:
[85:53] Well, and $50 million in 1982 or whenever he sued. So is this one of the first instances where it's conceivable that the subject of the Omnibus entry might actually listen to the episode of the Omnibus?

Speaker 2:
[86:11] He might. I mean, he's a big nerd. So hopefully, he doesn't have any issues or anything I've said.

Speaker 1:
[86:18] When we talked about Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius, we actually heard from some of the characters involved in the creation of Bob Dobbs, and they were thrilled that we had entered them into the Omnibus.

Speaker 2:
[86:33] Oh, good. Yeah. Well, hopefully, Jeff Nolan hears about this. I mean, yeah, because you can go on YouTube and you can find pretty current interviews with him and he still goes and speaking engagements and stuff. And it's no mystery why he's successful. He's really bright. He's got this amazing deep voice that just draws you in. So it's no wonder he could sell things to people. And like I said, he's just super bright. He's still building things. You know, he's a good showman. He's a good engineer.

Speaker 1:
[87:08] But he's also demonstrated that he's very litigious. So, yeah, you know, if at any point in this show, I suggested that he was a wife swapping furry. I want to say that I did not mean that at all. I meant that he was a good solid American tech entrepreneur and Christian, even if lapsed. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[87:37] Yeah, same here. Yeah, I mean, yeah, he's been married twice, but that's about it, which is like, you know, pretty on par for most tech guys.

Speaker 1:
[87:47] Sure. I would be surprised if he hadn't been.

Speaker 2:
[87:50] So, yeah. But the kind of funny little epilogue is so Chuck E. Cheese is bought by Showtime Pizza. And then the one last, like, weird thing. I mean, actually, there's a lot of weird things. If you look at the history of Chuck E. Cheese since then, it has been a total rollercoaster of strangeness. But the one last weird thing for this time is right after Chuck E. Cheese gets purchased by Showtime Pizza Theater, Aaron Fetcher, the animatronic genius, leaves the company. And I don't know why this was the arrangement. Aaron Fetcher owned the rights to the Showtime Pizza characters.

Speaker 1:
[88:30] Wow, that seems like an oversight.

Speaker 2:
[88:33] And he takes them with him, but apparently never does anything with them. He just takes them and leaves.

Speaker 1:
[88:40] Puts them back in his garage and, for all we know, is running some kind of animatronic sex robot business on the side.

Speaker 2:
[88:49] Yeah, yeah, who knows? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe he's a future entry. You know, I didn't do a ton of research on him. But so he leaves. And so Showbiz Pizza basically is like, well, we own these Chuck E. Cheese characters. So they sort of retrofit. At least Chuck E. Cheese. I think they come up with some new characters. Like obviously, the Confederate hound dog doesn't quite make it through the hippo that with the bouncing bosom doesn't doesn't move forward. But Chuck E. Cheese does. And actually, what's kind of fun is you can go on YouTube and you can find old copies of an of a training video that the company put out. And it's just total nightmare fuel. And it's how to disassemble the Showbiz Pizza Bear and retrofit him with Chuck E.

Speaker 1:
[89:35] Oh, so you see their weird eyeballs on some sort of Terminator skeleton.

Speaker 2:
[89:40] Yeah, you see him pull the hair off. Yeah. And then, and refit it as Chuck E. Cheese and the other characters in the band. And yeah, it's just total nightmare fuel. And it's also amazing because it's a mid 1980s VHS tape corporate training film.

Speaker 1:
[89:58] Yeah. I feel like that. Why has that never appeared in some sort of dystopian film about the end times where the, you know, the, the rebels or whatever, those survivors of the apocalypse are sifting through the rubble. And all of a sudden, an animatronic band starts playing, but their, but their hair is all fallen off and they're all, I feel like I hate to keep, because I did this on an earlier episode of Omnibus, where I just am seeing everything so cinematically. It's like, oh, this would be an amazing scene in a movie. And maybe what, maybe what we should do is over time, every time I say that, we should just add that scene to the same movie and eventually figure out a way to write a script around it. But I feel like this is, this is the scene, this is a takeaway scene.

Speaker 2:
[90:50] Yeah, I know. I like that. That would be, yeah, that would be horror. I actually, it was funny. I don't know, there, there is kind of a little bit of pop culture horror around this idea. I don't know, are you, are you, has your daughter ever mentioned a game called Five Nights at Freddy's?

Speaker 1:
[91:07] No, but she's not a gamer.

Speaker 2:
[91:09] Oh, that's, yeah, that's right. You said that in the other episode. Yeah. Well, I didn't know, because Five Nights at Freddy is, it's very big with, with the kids right now. Like my kids, that's, they, they were very into it. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a current video game. And the premise of the video game is that you've been hired to be the night security guard at what is very clearly a Chuck E. Cheese, but that, but it's Freddy's Pizza. But the, what the, what your employer doesn't tell you is that the, the suits come alive at night and try to get the night security guard.

Speaker 1:
[91:43] Right. So this horror idea is already in the popular.

Speaker 2:
[91:47] Yeah, it is. And there was a, there was a movie that came out last year.

Speaker 1:
[91:51] And it's so amazing how many things come out that I'm not, it just doesn't even hit me at all. I don't even get a whiff of it.

Speaker 2:
[92:00] Oh, yeah. I'm only aware of it because of my kits. Five Nights at Freddy's is firmly the, firmly the property of Gen Z.

Speaker 1:
[92:09] And that concludes Nolan Bushnell. Entry 167MA1323, certificate number 48560 in the Omnibus. Futurelings, as you know, well, social media is not worth a plug-nickel. But if you are interested in watching today's show as a video construct, where you can see Keli and myself in all of our glory and all of our bearded glory, we have a YouTube channel. It is youtube.com/at The Omnibus Project. And this show will appear there. You can go to Facebook and Instagram and see our posts at Omnibus Project. But also go to Reddit, Facebook, Discord, search for Futurelings, and you'll find other Omnibus fans discussing this show and all the other shows. They are lively and hilarious communities of fans. You can email us at theomnibusproject.gmail.com. And I promise I will read your email and laugh at it. But also perhaps read it on our Addenda show, which appears on our Patreon page along with other additional content, including an introductory episode where Keli and I discussed Keli's history as an army spook and New Mexico aquarium fan. So go to patreon.com/omnibusproject. And there are many, many other sort of elements of content, podcasts, videos available there. You can send me physical mail at the Omnibus Project, 609 Southwest 150th Street, number 48084, Burien, Washington, B-U-R-I-E-N, Washington, 98166-9998. Also visit us at omnibusproject.com, and you can submit an episode, as Keli did, at omnibusproject.com/submit.

Speaker 2:
[94:38] Futurelings, from our vantage point in your distant past, we have no idea how long our civilization survived. We hope and pray that the catastrophe we fear may never come. If the worst comes soon, this recording, like all our recordings, may have been our final word. But if providence allows, we wish you many goods and cheese, and hope to be back with you soon for another entry in the Omnibus.